Katri Pynnöniemi
[1 Senior Research Fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, katri.pynnoniemi@fiia.fi]
It is not at all easy to be sure what this tremendous growth
of propaganda in the contemporary world signifies, whether
it is a passing phase or something deep and permanent.
Sometimes it seems as if the august nations of the world
have become for the time like little boys at school who make
horrid faces at one another and shout resounding threats
F.C. Bartlett, 1942[2 Bartlett 1942, 2]It is remarkable how little the world has changed in hundred years when it comes to falsehood in wartime. The Great War, or the war currently known as the First World War, was fought in a “fog of falsehood” made of deliberate official lies, deliberate lies, mistranslations, forgeries, omissions, faked photographs and descriptions of atrocities that never took place. In an introduction to a study of lies, which had a significant impact on the course of the Great War, Arthur Ponsonby noted: “There must have been more deliberate lying in the world from 1914 to 1918 than in any other period of the world’s history”
[3 Ponsonby 1928, 19]. This has proved to be an understatement.
However, a sample collected by Ponsonby in 1928 shows that the forms of falsehood have changed only little since the Great War. The story of a “crucified person” – sometimes a girl, sometimes an American, but most often a Canadian solder, underwent many variations in 1915, and was used again in the context of the war in Ukraine in 2014
[4 The Russian state-controlled Channel One TV aired a forged report of a witness claiming to have seen Ukrainian soldiers crucifying a three-year-old boy on a billboard. Channel One did not alter the story, although it was quickly exposed as a lie. A web project called “Stop Fake” has investigated and exposed many other examples of atrocities reported by the Russian media that actually never took place. Ennis 2015. See also www.stopfake.org]. The Allies of the Great War were able to convince the public of Germany’s “sole responsibility”
[5 Ponsonby 1928, 57–62] for the conflict and to personify the enemy in the image of “Criminal Kaiser”
[6 Ponsonby 1928, 71–76]. Currently, Russia is feeding its domestic public with stories of “the West sponsoring violence in Ukraine” or, in turn, “the West turning a blind eye” to what is happening in the country. The fact that these claims are mutually contradictory is a characteristic feature of Russian strategic deception and something that makes it different from Soviet propaganda campaigns. Soviet propaganda was anchored in ideological truth claims, whereas the contemporary Russian variant can be compared to a kaleidoscope: a light piercing through it is instantly transformed into multiple versions of reality.
One of the most infamous examples of WWI propaganda was the sinking of the passenger ship Lusitania on May 7, 1915, which inflamed popular indignation and brought the United States into the war. It destroyed German propaganda hopes in the U.S. but provided a valuable asset in the hands of British propagandists whose job was to demonize Germans
[7 Rankin 2008, 58]. Almost exactly hundred years later, the downing of the Malaysian airline MH17 on July 17, 2014, brought the conflict in Eastern Ukraine to the world’s attention. It was only after this tragic event that the existence of a warlike situation in the region was recognized officially by the US and the EU
[8 The European Union reacted on July 25 by adding five members of the Russian Security Council to the sanctions list, including also other Russian officials and intelligence officers responsible for actions undermining Ukrainian sovereignty. The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) gave a recommendation on July 18, 2014, to avoid using the airspace in Eastern Ukraine. EASA 2014]. Immediately after the event, Russia sought to distract the public with several invented and often contradictory stories of the Ukrainian air defence having hit the MH17, or a Ukrainian ground attack airplane Sukhoi SU-25 having brought down the Boeing, or President Putin’s plane being in danger. The main propaganda line in this case was a combination of deliberate official lies and omission of critical information. Some Russian officials asserted that, indeed, the plane was downed by a BUK-M1 missile, as has been established convincingly by international and independent research groups
[9 Higgins 2015]. However, according to the Russian official version, the BUK-M1 was operated by the Ukrainian army and not by Russian soldiers
[10 A report by the Russian Channel One on 16 July 2015 summarizes the Russian official version of the tragedy. Vernitskii 2015; also Stopfake.org, 18 July 2015]. Parallel to this, other narratives were run by the Russian authorities, the one about the Ukrainian Sukhoi SU-25
[11 A Russian Defence Minist y briefing for the media, 21 June 2014], and another about Ukrainian fighter jets shooting down the airliner. These narratives even contradicted each other, not only the official Ukrainian government position.
Historical comparison should not be pushed too far, though. The forms of falsehood we identify in this report have their roots in the past, but they work in ways people living in 1914 could not imagine. Today social media has opened up new opportunities for the manipulation of public opinion, for example by making the circulation of faked photographs fast and easy. A sophisticated, carefully planned and professionally executed disinformation campaign may function as an “information weapon”
[12 Lucas and Nimmo 2015; Nato Strategic Communications Center for Excellence 2014; Pomerantsev and Weiss 2014]. This weapon takes advantage of rhizomatic networks of contemporary media space in creating “an alternative reality in which all truth is relative and no information can be trusted”
[13 Nimmo 2015, 1; Pomerantsev and Weiss 2014]. However, social media and new communication technologies in general also provide means for tracing the authenticity of each photograph posted online, thus creating a forum for investigative journalism and development of new research methods
[14 Margetts et. all. 2016].
In this report we analyse Russian propaganda and disinformation – here collectively called strategic deception – concerning the conflict in Ukraine. Strategic deception is a generic term used, for example, with reference to British and Allied intelligence operations against Nazi Germany in WWII
[15 Howard 1996]. In the Russian context, strategic deception (in Russian strategicheskaya maskirovka) refers to measures undertaken to hide military objects or strategic information using different camouflage (maskirovka) techniques, including disinformation (dezinformatsiya). As explained in one Russian military encyclopedia, strategic disinformation is distributed via media (TV, radio, the press) and through diplomatic and other channels
[16 The War and Peace dictionary, <http://voina-i-mir.ru/chapter/5>; [website], accessed 14 March 2016. For recent research on Russian military theory and the role of information war in it, see e.g. Franke 2015; Darczewska 2014; Jaitner and Mattson 2015; on countering strategic maskirovka see Lindley-French 2015]. In Russia’s information security doctrine, the term strategic camouflage is mentioned in the context of the Russian information security system in the sphere of defence, where its task is to “improve the ways and means of providing strategic and operational camouflage and conducting intelligence and electronic countermeasures, along with the betterment of methods and tools for actively countering propaganda, information and psychological operations by a likely adversary”
[17 Information Security Doctrine 2000]. An encyclopedia of information-psychological operations explains the difference between standard (in above operational) and strategic information war. Standard stands for measures undertaken to ‘hide’ an object, for example as Russia successfully did with the invention of ‘little green men’ during the Crimean operation. In this context, strategic means that perception(s) of reality based on actual facts on the ground are replaced with simulacra that look real but are artificially created and controlled
[18 Manoilo et al. 2011, 72].
The Russian approach to the conflict can be described as a combination of tools perfected during the Soviet period and reactivated, first in the context of domestic power struggle and later in that of Russian foreign and security politics. Using a full spectrum of means from political, informational, economic, financial and military spheres, the adversary is put into a defensive posture and off balance, and thus, conditions are created for (military) surprise
[19 See Jonsson and Seely for a description of Russian activities in the Ukraine conflict using the concept of full-spectrum conflict. Jonsson and Seely 2015]. This is in essence what strategic deception is about.
However, the debate that has followed the Crimean operation has conceptualized the dual nature of Russian strategy – the combination of information-psychological measures with different forms of armed aggression - as a hybrid war. Most analysts agree that this concept has limited analytical value in explaining Russian actions leading to and during the conflict. Yet, after the concept was used in the official Western description of the events, it has become a politically convenient shorthand to explain the mixture of military and nonmilitary measures used by Russia in Ukraine. Much of this discussion, however, is oriented to elaborate on the implications of the Russian aggression for Europe in general and for the countries in Russia’s immediate neighbourhood in particular
[20 Racz 2015; Franke 2015; for a critical review of the hybrid war concept, see Kofman 2016; Bartles 2016; Johnsson and Seely 2015; Reisinger and Golts 2014].
Therefore, we prefer the term deception because it can be traced to Russian military thinking and it captures an essential feature of the Russian strategy: alteration of the target audiences’ perception of reality to secure strategic objective(s). Furthermore, our choice of this term, instead of the hybrid war or information war concepts, indicates the limits of our analysis. This is not a report about Russia’s (hybrid) war against Ukraine in its entirety or a research into the role of “weaponization of information”
[21 Pomerantsev and Weiss 2014; the Russian information security doctrine from 2000 refers to the “use of information weapon against Russian information infrastructure” as an increasing threat. Information Security Doctrine 2000] in the survival of the Russian political system. Neither does this report investigate how different forms of information-psychological influence have been used in different phases of the conflict (e.g. trolling) to support objectives of Russian foreign and security policy.
Rather, the main purpose of this research is to examine in detail the emergence and evolution of Russian metanarratives and the terms of distraction about the conflict in Ukraine, and on the basis of this analysis to ascertain the main policy objectives of Russian strategic deception inside Russia and in selected countries
[22 Finland, Sweden, Estonia, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Czech Republic] of the European Union. Another research question to answer is: to what extent is Russian strategic deception tailored to the target countries, or is the narrative promoted in the West generally the same? And, how coherent is Russian strategic deception? If there are contradictions between certain elements of the Russian narrative, how are they handled? In this research, we will not study the impact of Russian propaganda and disinformation on the target countries abroad. However, the results of this research will help to better understand what Russian strategic deception is about and how it works.
Our preliminary assumption is that while inside Russia the main objective is to win public support for the government’s actions in Ukraine, regarding the West the often openly false, rapidly varying Russian communication is aimed not at convincing the decision-makers, but at dazzling the public audience by providing numerous alternative narratives to the Western ones. As the main objective of these measures is to dazzle and disorient Western public, running several parallel narratives is not a deficiency, but an asset and important feature of Russian strategic deception.
Another assumption inherent in the research design is that we expect there to be a certain congruence between Soviet and contemporary Russian strategic deception. The Soviet ‘propaganda machine’ was centrally organized, and it had on its disposal significant resources and could carry out various types of activities from the distribution of forgeries and activation of agents of influence to the use of front organizations in furthering Soviet foreign policy objectives. Nothing was done haphazardly, although not always efficiently
[23 United States Department of State 1985, 17]. In the course of the research, we seek to ascertain whether there is a link between Soviet-era propaganda methods and the contemporary ones, or whether the evolution of Russian propaganda and disinformation should be evaluated against broader conceptual and technological changes. It should be noted that these are not incompatible hypotheses, but the question is rather about the relative weight between the general (overall societal and technological) and particular (political context specific) aspects of change.
This report has three parts. The first part provides an overview of the conceptual and historical evolution of propaganda and disinformation. We will briefly study the method and operation of Soviet propaganda, including the so-called active measures, which was a collective term used for disinformation, propaganda and special operations, all conducted in order to influence world politics. This part of analysis is based on previous literature on Soviet propaganda and disinformation campaigns as well as on contemporary analyses of Russian information influence operations, on the basis of which we build a hypothesis of the contemporary Russian deception scheme. The analytical framework of the research is described at the end of the first part of the report.
In the second part of the report, we present an analysis of Russian metanarratives about the conflict. The main body of research material for this part of analysis consists of official statements and texts and media reports about the conflict published by the Russian state media. As already noted, we do not study the role of social media in Russian propaganda but rely on already substantial previous research on this topic. The second part of the report provides a background for the third part, which explores the emergence of pre-formulated metanarratives in selected case studies. This part of our research will be conducted together with researchers from each case study country. The main body of empirical material is from the period between February 2014 and late September 2014. In conclusion, we will provide an overview of the case studies and insights on how the Russian deception scheme worked in picturing the conflict and war in Ukraine.
